Budget cuts resulting in safety concerns

Fewer employees of the Okanagan Skaha School District get hurt than their counterparts in other areas of the province, but budget cuts are leading to more safety complaints, according to the teacher’s union.

District staff lost 741 days due to injury during 2017, with 37 claims filed through WorkSafeBC, according to a report presented this week to the board.

Doug Gorcak, facilities manager for the Okanagan Skaha School District, said the amount of lost days may seem high, but includes claims carried over from previous years.

“It’s not that those initial 37 injuries have lost (all the) man-days,” Gorcak said. “We’ve had a couple injuries in prior years that are still carrying on. People are still missing time, there is still doctors, invoices going back and forth with WorkSafe.”

Total claims costs came in at $22,077, way down from $132,421 a year earlier.

Slips, trips, falls and injuries caused by simply moving the body topped the list of injury frequency in 2017, with one outlying “act of violence” in November cited in the report.

Gorcak declined to comment on specifics of that incident for privacy reasons.

Okanagan Skaha Teachers’ Union president Leslea Woodward said an act of violence can also include a threat, something that doesn’t always show up in reports.

“In this day and age, teachers are experiencing more threats of violence. There’s a lot more teachers being kicked, hit, spit on,” Woodward said. “It’s not always to the point where those injuries prevent them from working.”

She added Okanagan Skaha does not have the issues of violence faced by some teachers in the Lower Mainland.

“Just because of our numbers we don’t have the extreme violence you would see in a big centre, but we certainly have noticed (the number of incidents) has gone up.”

Teachers, who form the largest part of the district staff, sustained the majority of injuries last year at 15, followed by educational assistants (11), custodians (6) and maintenance workers (4).

Most safety complaints Woodward receives at the union office are related to concerns about equipment maintenance and hygiene due to staffing cutbacks.

“With things maybe breaking down, or falling apart in schools, there’s just not the money with the staff anymore to provide maintenance to repair those,” Woodward said. “So it takes way longer to get things fixed and that could be a safety concern.”

The report includes an injury frequency rate from a complicated formula that includes reported injuries and hours worked.

The rate in Okanagan Skaha was 1.3 versus the 2.4 average across all B.C. school districts.